Auskunft zu diesem Dagstuhl Seminar erteilt

Dokumente

Summary

Network management currently undergoes massive changes towards realizing
more flexible management of complex networks. Recent efforts include slicing data plane resources by using network (link) virtualization and applying operating system design principles in Software Defined Networking (SDN).
Driven by network operators, network management principles are currently
envisioned to be even further improved by virtualizing network functions
which are currently realized in dedicated hardware appliances.
The resulting Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm abstracts
network functions from dedicated hardware to virtual machines running on
commodity hardware and enables a Cloud-like network management.
All of these efforts contribute to a softwarization of communication
networks.

This softwarization represents a significant change to network design
and management by allowing the application of operating system design
and software engineering principles to make network management more
efficient, e.g., by enabling flexible and dynamic service provisioning.

Since the NFV efforts are currently mainly driven by carriers and standardization bodies, academic research is decoupled from the industry driven NFV attempts in redesigning network management. Due to this missing link to academic research, opportunities for groundbreaking research and broad impact in academia are currently missing out. This Dagstuhl Seminar thus gathered researchers from academia, industry, and standardization bodies to establish this missing link by fostering collaborations and joint research initiatives.
Thus, a particular focus of the seminar was on identifying the diverse
connections between industry driven NFV efforts and current academic
networking research.

The seminar brought together 24 participants in January 2017 to discuss a potential NFV research agenda within 2.5 days. The program included different invited talks that provided an overview on selected aspects of NFV and lightning talks by each participants to provide first research questions and to sketch research directions. We summarize each talk in the remainder of this report. The main focus of the seminar was then the in-depth discussion the
research areas identified in the lightning talks in several breakout
sessions, which we also summarize. We closed the seminar by collecting and discussing several opinions from each participant: (i) lessons learned and surprises on NFV during the seminar and (ii) open research questions.
We further collected controversial statements on NFV research and asked
the seminar participants on whether they agree or disagree to each
presented statement. We summarize the outcomes at the end of the report.